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<title>Your Memory burns more than the Cigarettes on my Skin by thefrenchmistake</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22466110">Your Memory burns more than the Cigarettes on my Skin</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefrenchmistake/pseuds/thefrenchmistake'>thefrenchmistake</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Walking Dead (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Post-Episode: s05e08 Coda (Walking Dead)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-01-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-01-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 18:48:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,186</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22466110</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefrenchmistake/pseuds/thefrenchmistake</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Now, he just presses cigarette after cigarette on his skin- his wrist, where the ghost of her touch lingers, and he wishes he could burn his eyes out so he would stop seeing her brains splatter on the fucking walls in front of him.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Daryl Dixon &amp; Beth Greene, Daryl Dixon/Beth Greene</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>22</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Your Memory burns more than the Cigarettes on my Skin</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>You’re gonna miss me so bad when I’m gone.</em>
</p><p>Fuck, he does, he does, and he needs to make it stop. He needs to make everything stop for a minute, or a century, and most of all he needs her back. But this world -his world- never gave a shit about need. It takes and it takes and it bleeds and baths in the corpses left behind.</p><p>And the burn is good-good-good because the pain is minor and the guilt crushing, and her blood still gleams before his eyes, just as her irises did that night on the other side of the fire.</p><p>Fucking hell, this planet is gonna swallow them whole, and it starts with the best of them.</p><p>Only logical.</p><p>The last standing will be the worst.</p><p>He will certainly be among them. Maybe he should be grateful, that she is gone, that she didn’t suffer like most of them did, that she didn’t turn into a fucking zombie, that she isn’t alive to see the world get even more fucked up than it already is and more of their friends die, that she won’t see him become the monster he was always meant to be down here.</p><p>Maybe he should be grateful.</p><p>He isn’t. Fuck, he isn’t, he could never be. Because he is a selfish piece of shit, and what he saw in her was the only goddamn beautiful thing left on Earth, the only gleam of salvation he could come close to.</p><p>Now, he just presses cigarette after cigarette on his skin- his wrist, where the ghost of her touch lingers, and he wishes he could burn his eyes out so he would stop seeing her brains splatter on the fucking wall in front of him.</p><p>He wishes he could burn a whole fucking lot. He wishes he could choke on the sobs that break his ribcage and scratch his throat at night, when the loneliness makes her voice echo in the silence of this godforsaken Earth, and it twirls and twirls until it’s all he can hear, all he will ever hear</p><p><em>I ain’t afraid of nothing</em>-<b><em>you’re gonna miss me</em></b></p><p><em>You don’t know shit</em>-<em>You just see another dead girl</em></p><p><em>Ain’t nothing worth seeing out there anymore</em>-<b><em>you’re gonna miss me so bad</em></b></p><p><em>You’ll be the last man standing</em>- <b><em>you’re gonna miss me so bad when I’m gone, Daryl Dixon.</em></b></p><p>And he does, he does, he does, but she’s nothing more than a pile of ashes and he bets her blood still stains the wall back there (he still sees it, he still hears the bang), and he is but a living corpse standing on the remains of what once was. He had been a corpse when he had found her, and she had managed the impossible: she revived him some.</p><p>But she was never meant to survive this fucking apocalypse, was she ? Sharp-witted but too soft as soon as you broke the edges. He broke them pretty fast, he figures.</p><p>She burned his even faster.</p><p>He presses the cigarette harder on his skin, shuts his eyes tighter to avoid seeing rays of sunshine tainted by blood and the hole in her head, and he tries to breath.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>He had never been scared of the shadows before - those that moved took an arrow to the head- but since her death, he’s scared shitless of them. Because in the middle of the night, when he’s laid down on his coat and can’t fall asleep although his eyes are closed, her golden hair paints itself on the inside of his eyelids, the strand of red ever present, and the memory of her sparkling blue eyes strikes him to his chore.</p><p>He’s always thought her a remaining of the world they once had, a cumulation of the most beautiful things they couldn’t reach anymore: her hair like the fucking sun itself, even smudged with dirt and blood, the color of her irises as bright as the sky, only darker, her pink, chapped lips and the paleness of her skin marked by scars (her wrists, her wrists).</p><p>He’s so mad.</p><p>He’s so mad.</p><p>There is no one to get revenge on. There is no one left to blame. There is nothing to be done anymore, and that’s what makes him crazy and makes his brains conjure her in the darkest of the night.</p><p>But the shape of her smile and the sound of her laugh already begin to fade, and so do every other characteristic that made her the best of them all, feature after feature, taken away by waves and he tries to fight the tide, he tries so hard but there is nothing to be done and soon he won’t even remember her voice.</p><p>Only the words.</p><p>Always the words.</p><p>Because she had a way with them; she wasn’t a poet, far from it, but then again who could be living in a world like this one ? But she knew them, she used them and she always knew what to say.</p><p>So maybe she didn’t really have a way with words, maybe she just knew how to talk to him; the result was the same. She talked, he listened, and her words seemed to carve themselves or something else into him, somewhere painful in his chest. They made him believe in things he never thought he could believe in, beginning with fucking <em>hope</em>, of all things.</p><p>And there were words restrained in his throat, too, words he couldn’t form on his tongue, but that were spreading and spreading, stretching and breaking from their chains. There were words he wanted to say, words he didn’t know the true meaning of because they were far too little for too big feelings, scratching his mouth until it was raw.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The wood under his body seems to break his back and bones, making him sore like never in the morning; but what does it matter ?</p><p>He’s failed her, he’s failed her, and these goddamn woods he doesn’t know still remind him of her and a little house burning down and a funerals home and a piano; goddamn, the piano. What he wouldn’t give to hear her play again.</p><p>Because she played him as well as she played the piano, and each time she pressed a right note it strung a chord in himself, it made him open up more and more until he could legitimately laugh -<em>laugh</em>, in this goddamn world, who would’ve thought ?- and she seemed to improvise, trying chord after chord and hearing a symphony being made and swelling up as she went and brushed her fingers against the pieces of his story. Maybe that’s why he fixed the damn music box for Maggie.</p><p>Maybe it’s for him as well.</p><p>He just knows that now, now all he feels is madness creeping up; he is hallow, like she burned something out of him, took it with her when the bullet shot through her brains.</p><p>And he misses it, goddamn, he misses her so bad.</p><p>It doesn’t change a thing. </p><p>The dead still rise at night, but she doesn’t.</p><p>Maggie and him push on.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>And that's a wrap ! Hope you enjoyed, kudos and comments are always welcome, <br/>See you soon !</p></blockquote></div></div>
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